The unequal vulnerability of communities of color to wildfire

Abstract

Globally, environmental disasters impact billions of people and cost trillions of dollars in damage, and their impacts are often felt most acutely by minority and poor communities. Wildfires in the U.S. have similarly outsized impacts on vulnerable communities, though the ethnic and geographic distribution of those communities may be different than for other hazards. Here, we develop a social-ecological approach for characterizing fire vulnerability and apply it to >70,000 census tracts across the United States. Our approach incorporates both the wildfire potential of a landscape and socioeconomic attributes of overlying communities. We find that over 29 million Americans live with significant potential for extreme wildfires, a majority of whom are white and socioeconomically secure. Within this segment, however, are 12 million socially vulnerable Americans for whom a wildfire event could be devastating. Additionally, wildfire vulnerability is spread unequally across race and ethnicity, with census tracts that were majority Black, Hispanic or Native American experiencing ca. 50% greater vulnerability to wildfire compared to other census tracts. Embracing a social-ecological perspective of fire-prone landscapes allows for the identification of areas that are poorly equipped to respond to wildfires.

Social vulnerability to large wildfires in the western USA

“…We used the US Census Bureau for the American Community Survey (ACS) five-year estimates for the period 2011-2015 to select 21 social attributes (Table 1) to capture the level of resilience to wildfires at the scale of US block groups and communities (Cutter et al, 2003;Davies et al, 2018;Flanagan, Gregory, Hallisey, Heitgerd, & Lewis, 2011;Fothergill, 1996;Peacock, Morrow, & Gladwin, 1997;Wigtil et al, 2016;Wright, Rossi, Pereira, & Weber-Burdin, 2012). Social conditions, including wealth, poverty, race and age can often influence wildfire preparation and mitigation (Nielsen-Pincus, Ribe, & Johnson, 2015;Paveglio, Brenkert-Smith, Hall, & Smith, 2015;Paveglio et al, 2018;Wigtil et al, 2016).…”

“…Of the 173 dead during the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Australia, 118 perished while sheltering in structures (Blanchi, Whittaker, Haynes, Leonard, & Opie, 2018), with 13% of all victims aged less than 18 (a substantial majority were under 15) and 16% aged 70 or over (Teague, McLeod, & Pascoe, 2010). These incidents revealed that differences in social vulnerability, defined as the adaptive capacity to absorb, recover and modify exposure to wildfires (Davies, Haugo, Robertson, & Levin, 2018), can affect the magnitude and duration of impacts like the loss of property, livelihoods, or services. Those hazards become disasters specifically when they affect socially vulnerable populations.…”

“…The extensive literature on social science related to wildfire issues (McCaffrey, 2015) has studied risk perception, mitigation decisions and perceived consequences (Champ & Brenkert-Smith, 2016;Champ, Donovan, & Barth, 2013;Dickinson, Brenkert-Smith, Champ, & Flores, 2015;Gordon, Luloff, & Stedman, 2012); community pre-fire mitigation (Cohn, Williams, & Carroll, 2008) and adaptive capacity ; residents' actions and adaptation (Brenkert- Smith, 2006); and community social diversity and vulnerability (Paveglio, Nielsen-Pincus, Abrams, & Moseley, 2017;Paveglio, Prato, Edgeley, & Nalle, 2016). However, work to assess wildfire risk by integrating social and natural systems is relatively new (Cutter, Boruff, & Shirley, 2003;Davies et al, 2018;Gaither, Goodrick, Murphy, & Poudyal, 2015;Gaither et al, 2011;Oliveira, Zêzere, Queirós, & Pereira, 2017;Parisien et al, 2016;Wigtil et al, 2016) or applied at limited geographic scales (Fischer, Kline, Ager, Charnley, & Olsen, 2014;Nielsen-Pincus et al, In review;Olsen, Kline, Ager, Olsen, & Short, 2017;Paveglio, Edgeley, & Stasiewicz, 2018;Paveglio et al, 2016), leaving a gap in our knowledge about large-scale transboundary risk in relation to behavioral response to fire. Our first goal is to understand where transboundary large fire events originate and how they spread through a mosaic of land tenures, management jurisdictions and fuel models, and quantify their impacts on the communities of three socially and biophysically distinct fire-prone regions of the western US.…”

“…A large percentage of fire events that affect developed areas in the western US originate on public wildlands (Ager et al, in review). Since socially vulnerable populations have relatively less capacity to absorb, recover and reduce risk and exposure from large wildfires (Cutter & Emrich, 2006;Davies et al, 2018), our second goal was to provide federal land managers with an assessment of the social conditions of the populations mostly affected (spatially defined as either communities or census block groups) by wildfires originating on adjacent public administered lands, to incorporate and adapt this knowledge in their management strategy.…”

Disturbances as opportunities: Learning from disturbance‐response parallels in social and ecological systems to better adapt to climate change

“…Others have found that responses after disturbances often are most damaging for poor and marginalized groups (e.g. Davies, Haugo, Robertson, & Levin, 2018) and exacerbate existing inequalities—resources are often directed to people and places that have power and capacity to make their political voices heard (Mockrin et al, 2016; Nohrstedt & Weible, 2010; Tompkins & Adger, 2004). Emergency management is often disconnected from integrated planning processes that might identify needs and opportunities for improving community response, with the result that emergencies are not capitalized upon as opportunities for change.…”